When You're Strange

When You’re Strange: A Film About The Doors Directed by Tom DiCillo At Angelika Film Center Runtime: 90 min.

Narrating When You’re Strange: A Film About The Doors, Johnny Depp intones: “Jim Morrison was dangerous and highly intelligent. No one has had exactly this combination before.” Obviously Depp and director Tom DiCillo never heard of Muddy Waters or saw Jeffrey Wright’s dangerous, highly intelligent, virile Waters impersonation in Cadillac Records. There’s so much hipster hagiography in When You’re Strange it cancels out DiCillo’s careful attempt at chronicling an admired icon. At several points the doc lapses into montages about the 1960s assassinations, murders, riots, protests and Vietnam, as if to place The Doors at the center of these events. It’s uselessly romantic and infuriatingly revisionist.

Ironically, When You’re Strange contains DiCillo’s best filmmaking. He’s collated the exhaustingly documented life of the ’60s L.A. rock band, using lots of color studio recording footage and archival clips from Morrison’s own film projects, including his experimental shorts HWY and Feast of Friends. There’s a nice match-cut from cute Jim in the first blush of stardom to a family photo of him as a youth striking the same flirty-kid pose; he has the well-fed face and curly-haired lushness of an idealized American white boy introducing an era of unsettling androgyny. This contrasts a later image of Morrison stoned, twitching in the corner at a recording session while Depp details: “No one talks about the elephant in the room.”

Other than rockist/racist adoration, that’s the biggest problem with this bio-doc. It accepts the Morrison myth. Badboy Depp, of all people, reads DiCillo’s script with a blasé attitude that suggests neither of them know the Why of narcissism or drugs. Depp’s too-cool summation— “This much is true: You cannot burn-out if you’re not on fire”—is unacceptable.

Perhaps fortunately, DiCillo never attempts cinematic interpretation of Doors songs such as W.T. Morgan did so brilliantly for the succeeding L.A. band X in The Unheard Music. We’re left to appreciate the Doors’ significance as Oliver Stone tumultuously rendered it in his 1991 biopic or simply recalling for ourselves the band’s rich, stylized sound, Morrison’s insinuating low notes on the chorus of “Light My Fire” and the way it would influence both Ian Curtis in New Order and Ian McCullough in Echo and the Bunnymen. That’s The Doors’ best legacy.